[I have tried very hard to keep this blog somewhat impersonal, and I think, for the most part, I succeeded in that. Being closed off is not a virtue, and never was, but there are some things that aren't meant to be posted on the internet. When I have aired personal struggles, I have done so in hopes of offering some small encouragement to others. I don't want pity, or sympathy. Empathy, yes, but not sympathy.

Mine is not a success story, and I've never claimed to have conquered the things that ail us. I have no interest in patting myself on the back, telling myself that I have done well. I have not finished the race.

But, I am moving toward the goal, whatever it is.]

In each of the last few years, Holy Week has not been a particularly joyful time for me. It should be, but I admit, Good Friday is more unsettling to me than beautiful. Even Easter Sunday has taken on a more somber character for me of late. Why this is, I can't say exactly. I have a particular aversion to violent execution, and Friday always brings with it visions of that horrid and brutal practice. I think of Jesus the man, and how he really did suffer. I think of his mother, how her whole world must have ended as she watched her first born son fight in agony for his diminishing life. . I think of St. John, given that impossible task of caring for the grieving mother. I think of Judas's suicide, of Peter's shame, of Thomas's anguish. It breaks my heart. My home church hosts a prayer vigil every year. The room is filled with expressionist art and the lights are dark. It's cold, and music plays softly as the Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion are flashed across a screen. It wears on my spirit, and last year I ended up sitting in a chair with my eyes shut tight trying to forget where I was. The worst part of Good Friday is the fact that the Resurrection has not yet come. Each year, it's as if I experience it all over again. It's stupid, but I found myself wondering once, what if He really is dead this time? 



And then there is Saturday. On that day, God lies dead in a borrowed tomb, and hope is all but gone. Every time I think about it, I'm filled with fear and hatred. Like Thomas, I want to run away. 



Read the rest of this entry . . .

Some of the more famous political bloggers are passing around a "10 Books That Most Influenced My Thinking" meme. Politics is nowhere near my primary interest, but I'm sure I have enough books that have influenced me to get ten (come to think of it, I believe I did one of these at some point, but it's long enough ago to where I think things might ahve changed somewhat. Anyways, list follows, accompanied by brief explanations. Bible excluded, alphabetical order by author. And yes, this list goes to 11.

Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox - G.K. Chesterton

It's probably somewhat strange to put a biography on here. I was researching a paper on St. Thomas, and picked this little gem up from the library. Chesterton's biography probably isn't the best, but I doubt there's one that better captures the essence of St. Thomas. Aquinas' actual writing is also very close to me (and there's enough to where I doubt I'll ever get through it all), but it is his life that has had the greatest impact on me.

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is, without a doubt in my mind, the greatest novel ever written. I don't mean to say that it is my favorite, but it is the best. For one thing, it is the quintessential example of an iconic novelist writing at the very height of his artistic capacities. He exercises complete control over the work, without smothering it.

Most of all though, I do believe this novel is part of the reason I returned to faith. Many of my ideas about faith in the context of an 'Enlightened' world mirror the arguments presented here.

The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky

To me, this novel, more than any other, proves why Dosteovsky is a truly great writer. I say that because, despite how flawed it is, he did not try and steer it in the direction he would have wished it to go. When it was coming to a climax, he understood how it must end and didn't blink.

Also, the ethical arguments given are some of the best this side of the Bible (and I would argue they are Biblical).

Collected Poems - T.S. Eliot

This list could have been all poets, but I'm only going to rank Eliot. In terms of influence, depth of vision, style, and and overall quality of output, Eliot has no equal. Not in the twentieth century at least. Perhaps never.

The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

This was the second Faulkner novel I read, and my favorite. His insights on the human experience of time are not really original, but he expressed it best and grasped its importance better than anyone, save Proust.

The End of the Affair - Graham Greene

A strong reminder of the "appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."

Fear and Trembling - Soren Kierkegaard

I could have put most anything by Kierkegaard here, but I will just go with what I read first. No Christian thinker has challenged me as much. None (besides Lewis) have been so rewarding, either.

Till We Have Faces - C.S. Lewis

This book cemented my belief that Lewis's greatest achievements were in fiction rather than theo-philosophy. It is perfect, absolutely perfect.

The last passage has been of great comfort to me in times of need.

Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor

Stylistically, O'Connor is a true genius. She just knew how to write instinctively. I don't think she was capable of writing poorly. Her novels, letters, essays, and spiritual reflections all belong here too.

O'Connor has taught me much about God, and she continues to teach. I recommend the collection of her spiritual writings anyone even vaguely interested in theology. She continues to be the standard by which I judge all Christian art.

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

I find myself consistently identifying with the protagonists in Percy's novels. He wrote a single theme, and wrote it very well. This novel is his first. Not his best, perhaps, but as clear as anything he ever wrote. I have nothing but admiration for the man.

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

Tolkien helped spark my love of stories, and for that, I'm forever grateful. There is no grander achievement in Western Literature.

Do a list of your own.

Because I'm beyond sick of listening to doom and gloom, I figured I'd post a few things a conservative could be happy about with the Health Care bill.

1) It's a much more conservative bill than we could have had. Single-payer wasn't even on the table. The public option died a while back. That's not to say that it is a conservative bill, but it could have been worse. Some have noted that this bill bears an interesting resemblance to the Republican Health Care bill in 1993, which they never had to actually put on the table given the Clinton plan's implosion. Given the gigantic Democratic majority in Congress, that's saying something.

2) For better or worse, legislation was left to the legislators. Not everybody thinks this is important, or even good, but I did. The Executive branch played its role as a tempo setter, but the actual legislation was done where it was supposed to be done. Democrats likely learned this after watching Clinton's fantastic early missteps, and didn't make the same mistake twice. Granted, the legislators are, for the most part, idiots, but as far as respecting the proper role of each branch, it's something to be happy about.

3) Paul Ryan. There's no reason to think Paul Ryan is the next President of the United States or anything, but he performed admirably in this debate. For all his faults, one cannot accuse him of not taking the problem seriously. His own Health Care bill would have scaled back Medicare a ton, something that most Republicans are unwilling to get behind, because Medicare is popular. He's young, smart, and principled, and we need more like him.

4) Fiscal responsibility became an actual issue. Many liberals have said that Health Care reform is a moral imperative, and must be done no matter the cost. Whatever the actual fiscal outcome of this bill, the fact that Congress made genuine attempts at addressing the deficit within the bill should be a sign of encouragement. I'm not sure whether it will lower the deficit or not, but supporters of the bill believe that it will and should. That's encouraging to me, and it tells me that fiscal responsibility may one day return.

5) Uninsured people who need and want, but cannot afford Health Insurance will get it. This bill may very well save a great many lives. Whatever the disagreements, this should be a point of great jubilee among all Americans.

6) It's over. The first effort to try and get some kind of comprehensive Health Care Reform was made by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 (his effort ended with his defeat). It's 2010 and, for now at least, it's over. Glory hallelujah.

7) It's not the end of the world. It really isn't. I promise. It isn't even the end of America.

There are plenty of things to be disappointed about as far as this bill goes, but it isn't all bad.

I don't have much to say about the Texas Board of Education's decision to add a more conservative flavor to its history curriculum, other than that I think it's stupid ideologically base. I'm not angry, because I'm not in High School anymore, but I do really hate politicizing history. And this move was explicitly political. Don McLeroy, the battering ram behind the new and improved curriculum said, "History is too important not to politicize." About the revisions, he says, "We're adding balance. History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left."

Both sides of the political spectrum use history to their advantage when they can. Some do it honestly, others not so much. Ignoring, for the moment, the overreaches of the left, I've been pretty regularly disgusted by conservative politicians doling out history lessons. Most don't have a clue what they're talking about (I'm assuming they aren't just lying). My education in history is almost entirely self-imposed (that is to say, it isn't all that deep), and I could easily go through speech after speech and point out distortions, errors, omissions, etc. I attribute this entirely to the shallowness of the history, and not to my breadth of knowledge.

As for the SBOE's motion, you can read an annotated copy of the revisions (that highlights exactly what was cut out and what was put in) here. Scroll through the story at the top, and then you can read the entire thing.

It's mostly word-play, some of it entirely uncontroversial. A lot of it, though, when seen in the light of the board's political leanings, is pretty ridiculous. For instance, changing the term "imperialism" to "expansionism," eliminating the references to American propaganda playing a role in our entry into WWI, an implied vindication of McCarthy, changing the word "actions" to "flawed monetary policy of" in reference to Federal Reserve's role in the causes of the Great Depression, replacing "capitalism" with "free-enterprise system", a curious emphasis on the phrase "In God We Trust" (not "coined" until 1864, by the way), and a de-emphasis of race.

Probably the most notorious measure (though not, I think, the most egregious) is the board's decision on the world history course, in which it decided to delete Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures who influenced the revolutions at the end of the 18th Century. He was replaced by Calvin, Aquinas, and William Blackstone. Leaving Jefferson off that list would not have been a major problem for me, considering the fact that his thought is basically a regurgitation of John Locke. He did so very eloquently, and his influence on the early formation of the early United States can hardly be understated, but leaving him off a list that presumably includes Locke and Rousseau would not incite much passion in me either way. And, by the way, the Reformation's role in shaping Enlightenment political thought deserves more emphasis.

The problem with this particular revision is that it isn't a case of simple omission (history surveys omit lots of important details). It was a deletion. Choosing who to put on a list is one thing, but once a figure is on the list, the reasons for removing him or her should be sound. No good reasons have been given, but the assumption is that it is a backlash against Jefferson's coining of the phrase, "seperation of Church-and-State." One board member, David Bradley, was quoted saying, “I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state. I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.” One wouldn't have to look very far, since the idea is established firmly in the first amendment, but I'm assuming the question is dishonest and obviously meant to demonstrate something everybody already knows - that the words "separation of Church and State" do not appear verbatim in the document - and so I won't bother petitioning to collect the reward. Besides offending my taste for actual facts, the Christian Nation myth commits one of the worst sins, in that it utilizes religion and appeals to God in order to achieve its own selfish ends. Facts aside, it's just wrong.

And, for the record, no, the irony of conservatives, who are always decrying big brotherism, manipulating language and history for the sake of propagating political ideology isn't lost on me.

No member of the board is an historian, economist, or sociologist, making the revisions all that more arbitrary. It's not as if historians haven't used history to argue political points (one needs to look only as far as the late Howard Zinn), but for a state school board to join in is just shameful. No human has ever been a disinterested observer, but many have at least tried. History isn't a political game. Each historical event is fortified by an infinite number of entangled facts. These exist independently of our own intuitions and sensibilities, and are apolitical, amoral, areligious. We are realistically able to know only a very small number of these facts. The historian's job is to piece together what facts we are able to access, and do his level best to paint a clear, disinterested picture of what actually happened. In other words, it is exactly the opposite of what the Board of Education did.

I don't believe much will actually change. Teachers, especially those teaching AP courses, will continue to teach what they've always taught. The information given in textbooks isn't likely to change much, in as far as most good High School textbooks encompass everything the board added, as well as what they removed.

It's the spirit of the thing, though, and the spirit matters. Don't worry, Texas, I love you still.

David Hajdu of the New Republic posted an interesting response to the suicide of Mark Linkous:

I had never been kind to Linkous as a listener or a critic. I found his music depressing, and I arrogantly dismissed what he did as an exploitation of the adolescent impulse to glamorize isolation and despair. I hadn't considered that the reality of emo fans' glorification of depression does not justify an assumption that an emo singer-songwriter such as Linkous was reveling in gloom only to seek glory. He was genuinely depressed, and he gave voice to his suffering in what I recognize now as a body of veraciously dreary songs centered on hopelessness and disillusion.

This seems about right to me.

First, I absolutely hate the word "emo." It means nothing. It was once a term to describe the music of Sunny Day Real Estate and Dashboard Confessional. Now, it's just used as a way of flippantly dismissing negative emotions. It's usually unfair and, many times, serves as a defense mechanism in a world that would always prefer to gloss over the genuine sense of alienation and loneliness that the vast majority of people experience at one time or another. And the fact that many people go through it does not diminish its significance.

Don't misunderstand me. By posting about it, I am not mythologizing Linkous, or any one who commits suicide. Suicide isn't heroic. It's very sad, and causes nothing but pain. It's ugly and unfair, and anyone who tries to make the action into something courageous or praiseworthy doesn't know what they're talking about.

What is fascinating about suicide is not the people who choose it, but how unshocking the idea is. The act of imminently guaranteeing death when there is no external threat, immediate trauma, or physical illness, is a uniquely human phenomenon. In fact, 25% of people who commit suicide show no obvious signs of depression. The idea that people only kill themselves after something bad has happened is a myth. Many just lose the will to go on living in despair.

That suicide is not particularly shocking to society as a whole speaks to the fact that part of us, however small, understands.

I don't really know if I have a larger point. Tangentially, I do think our society in general needs to take depression more seriously than it does. Granted, it's better than it used to be. The stigma surrounding psychological illness has grown much thinner than it once was. There is help out there. People live with this stuff, and even prevail in the fight against it, but the most important step is also the most excruciating. People cannot -should not - have to face it alone, especially when so many people do experience similar feelings. The feeling of emptiness and loneliness is greatest when one is surrounded by those who could potentially empathize but, for whatever reason, don't.

One intellectual rivalry the world was fortunate enough to see was that of C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot. I suspected Lewis and Eliot might have been acquaintances. They were contemporaries (Lewis at Oxford, Eliot at Cambridge) with similar areas of interest, both were Anglican, and both were considered preeminent scholars in their times. But was never aware of any interaction between the two. The only reference I was aware of came from Lewis in his poem, "A Confession:"

I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I've stared my level best
To see if evening-any evening-would suggest
A patient etherised upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn't able.

Tonight, I was thinking about it, and so I typed their names into Google, and came across this article. Apparently, there was some real tension between the two of them, and Lewis actually wrote a great deal against Eliot.

I don't have the energy to go through the article line-by-line right now, but it's a very interesting read, especially if you are familiar with their work. It left me a bit torn, because I love both, and I find points of agreement and disagreement on either side. Decide for yourself. I cannot.

Fortunately, the story has something of a happy ending:

In 1958 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, appointed both Eliot and Lewis to a commission charged with reviewing the Psalter. In the following years Eliot and Lewis met each other regularly during the meetings at Lambeth Palace which resulted in The Revised Psalter (1963). Now that they had gotten to know each other personally, a friendship came into being. 'You know I never liked Eliot's poetry, or even his prose. But when we met this time I loved him, Lewis told his private secretary Walter Hooper in the last summer of his life. The greetings in his letters to Eliot changed from 'Dear Sir' to 'Dear Mr. Eliot' to 'My dear Eliot.' After a conference in Cambridge of the Psalter-commission, Lewis and Eliot even had lunch together, with their wives, Helen Joy Davidman and Valerie Fletcher. According to Hooper, Lewis could have been talking about Eliot and himself when he wrote in the fourth chapter of The Four Loves.'

Like most people who grew up liking the movies, I'm infatuated by old movie stars. James Stewart, Judy Garland, Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Peter Fonda, and all the Hollywood luminaries who lit the screen in the age before CGI ruined everything. Something about the way their faces would shine in the lights of the black-and-white era. The voices, the accents that nobody has anymore. The stage-presence without the stage. Nostalgia and pretty things.

No figure of that era is quite so iconic as Katharine Hepburn. Her elegance, her beauty, her sharp tongue - they don't make 'em like that anymore. She was a true aristocrat, even as the aristocracy faded away.

I found this the other day. It's Hepburn reading a letter she wrote to Spencer Tracy after his death in 1967. It's really quite beautiful. It says a lot about both of them.

Michael Spencer, better known as the iMonk is dying of cancer. He has been given six months to a year to live.

As someone who read and often identified with his writing, this is sad for me. I can't imagine what it must feel like for those closest to him, for his wife. Apparently, he isn't in any real physical pain, and has taken the news as well as anyone can.

Pray for him, pray for his family.

Singer/songwriter Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse fame killed himself yesterday. There's not much to say, other than that it's tragic and sad, and I hope to God he found the peace his spirit needed.

I was thinking the other day about pairs of historical figures I wish had been contemporaries, so I could watch them square off. For instance, I would love to see Alexander the Great and Hannibal in a fist fight. I would pay dearly to see Abraham Lincoln debate FDR (I'm not saying they had any significant disagreements, it just would have been fun). I would love to see C.S. Lewis sit down with David Hume (in fact, I'd love to spend a night on the town with Hume). Kant and Mill would be fun to watch.

Above everything else, I would love to watch Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have a debate. When Kierkegaard died, Nietzsche was only eleven, and it wasn't until the last decade or so of Nietzsche's life that Kierkegaard began to get any recognition outside of Denmark. In many ways, they were kindred spirits. In the end, they came down on completely opposite sides of the spectrum, but the way in which each arrived as his position is remarkably similar. Intellectually, they are equals, and they both wrote with the same extreme passion. I have no idea whether they would have liked each other. I suspect Kierkegaard would have liked Nietzsche. Nietzsche didn't like very many people, but it's possible he would have found something worth liking in his Danish cousin.

We'll never know, I guess.

I'm sure everybody has seen those Levi's Jeans commercials with the Walt Whitman poem running through the background. Well, if you haven't, here you go:



I found out a while back that the commercial took a section from Whitman's poem "America," but what I didn't know was that the track behind the commercial is actually the voice of Walt Whitman himself. In 1889, Thomas Edison got a wax cylinder recording of Whitman reading some of his poems. The original recording was badly damaged, but these four lines were preserved. Pretty amazing. You can even hear a little bit of Brooklyn in his voice.

I should make note that the other Levi's commercial, while it does contain a Whitman poem does not boast the voice of Whitman (and you can tell - it's a lot less grainy).

Maybe this will raise your blood to the correct temperature.


Obama Caught Lip-Syncing Speech

If you don't find that funny, I suspect this video might help.

I learned over the weekend that Texas was the first state to elect a female governor (in 1925!). She is also, to my knowledge, the only female governor to ever win re-election. Miriam Fergusen was not the first female to serve in the office of governor, because two weeks earlier, Wyoming swore in Nellie Tayloe Ross after the death of her husband, Governor William B. Ross. The next time a woman was elected governor in the United States was not until 1967 (in Alabama).

What is more interesting, Fergusen ran on a strongly anti-Ku Klux Klan platform, enacting some strong restrictions on the group once in office (later overturned).

While I don't deny that the American South has been behind the rest of the nations on certain issues, I think many of the caricatures of the South as backwards and anti-progress are overblown. I don't know much about Fergusen's tenure as governor, and I do know that her husband had served earlier, but I think it's still interesting that that particular barrier was broken in the South.

Anyways, I just thought that was interesting.